Liberace, the Daily Mirror and a libel trial fiasco...

An anecdote to brighten this gloomy morning. Before we get to that, the context. Last evening, BBC1's The One Show ran an item about the 1950s libel action against the Daily Mirror by Liberace (think Elton John crossed with Alan Carr… only camper).

The item was pegged to the release of Stephen Soderbergh's movie, Behind the Candelabra, in which Michael Douglas gives a sterling performance as Liberace. It centres on his affair with a young man.

Throughout his life, Liberace publicly denied he was gay. In Britain at the time, where he was popular enough to enjoy sell-out tours and be mobbed wherever he went, homosexuality was illegal.

For some reason, despite Liberace's popularity, or more likely because of it, the Mirror's acerbic if generally liberal columnist, Cassandra (William Connor), decided in 1956 to take the hatchet to the entertainer's image.

He wrote of Liberace as "…the summit of sex — the pinnacle of masculine, feminine, and neuter. Everything that he, she, and it can ever want… a deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love".

Liberace sued for libel and the case went to trial in 1959. It was a fiasco. Liberace perjured himself by denying that he was homosexual. As for the Mirror, both Cassandra and the paper's editorial director, Hugh Cudlipp, both stretched credulity beyond breaking point by saying in evidence that the column was not meant to imply Liberace was homosexual.

The jury found for Liberace, who was awarded damages of £8,000 (according to The One Show, in today's money that would be £500,000).

It's no wonder that when he was appearing at the London Palladium some years later, Liberace told the Mirror's then show business editor, Bill Hagerty, he "owed a great deal to the Daily Mirror."

The trial was an early example of the syndrome that national newspaper publishers and editors gradually came to recognise as jury bias against "the press."

Anyway, in re-researching the case a couple of weeks ago, I noted that the Mirror man who covered the trial was one Howard Johnson, then the paper's chief reporter. I asked the Mirror diaspora if anyone knew whether he was still with us.

It transpired that "Johnny" Johnson, as he was known, passed away years ago, but it stimulated many memories of the man. By far the best anecdote came from photographer Eddy Rawlinson:

"I was in Northern Ireland photographing the funeral of two police officers shot by the IRA. In the background to my pictures were the Mountains of Mourne.

Back at the office, once Howard saw the pictures, his intro went something like… 'They buried two Ulster policemen here today and the Mountains of Mourne wept down to the sea…'"

I was prepared to accept this as an apocryphal tale until another Mirror snapper, Bill Kennedy, said he remembered the incident too, recollecting that the headline read: "The Mountains of Mourning."